Blog Wiki:How Many Rules Are Enough
Whew, codes of conduct for blogging. Bemoaning the decline of civility seems to be a frequent daily activity. Mostly,it means shaking one’s head and exchanging glances with others, as multiple boundaries are invaded. One of our solutions to the increase of incivility is to add more and more compulsory structure to our lives, both in the way of laws and things like rules for blogs. My question is whether it works or is even desirable. I think it ultimately degrades the First Amendment and gives us unenforceable and ridiculous volumes of rules for everything. Perhaps we all need to do several things, adopt one’s own personal code of conduct, say the Golden Rule(1), lighten up a bit, realizing that tolerating bad ideas and expression is necessary to preserve the good stuff. In ordering our own behavior, we need to employ as much common sense as we can muster and call upon all of our own will power not to respond in kind to assaults of bad grammar, stupidity and inadequate potty training-and yes even malice. Excessive rule making is just another chapter in venting, no matter how noble its stated purpose. The TV is blaring in the background and suddenly caught my attention. A young man, outside the studio, was displaying a big messy card, proposing to his girlfriend back home. He was singled out, and the reporter was in the process of calling his beloved–gosh, a double dose of privacy violation and ridicule. I turned off the TV, even though it did not rise to the level of TV courtroom drama or Jerry Springer. Daily, people fight to climb aboard public conveyances, before letting people off. Our public hospital is a source of physical comedy. There is one elevator that transports people between the outpatient clinic on the second floor. A trip takes about twenty minutes, because people have yet to realize that others need to get off first. No one enforces the express lines at supermarkets. Say something and the violator becomes belligerently indignant. Unruly children run amuck down the aisles, to the shouts of stop that or I’ll kill you. Those children usually live to ripe old ages, if they don’t eventually run too many stop signs or red lights. If they get too old or are disabled from stop sign running, they can rest assured that no one on a bus will relinquish a seat to them. (There’s a federal law about that.) We run a maze of complicated voice mails just to refill a prescription, and much telemarketing is automated. Get through your doctor’s electronic gate keeper, and you will run head-on into a receptionist who is underpaid in exchange for which she exercises unqualified medical power, with the force of a military drill instructor. We know that stress is harmful but spend more and more time devising rules that make it more so. Perhaps, learning to forgive one another our frequent lapses would be time better spent. Clearly, it is wrong to call one another names, but should it be illegal, because that’s where lengthy promulgation of blog rules is headed? We also need to be skeptical about statistics, even from the NY Times, checking them ourselves. Years ago, having moved to New Jersey, my wife and I were returning home from work. We were crossing at a four-way stop, and a car ran the sign, splattering us with dirty snow melt. My wife hurled gestures and invective. In sixteen years, I had never heard her do such a thing. “What was that about?” I inquired. Embracing me, she cried, “Oh, I’m so glad you agreed to move here, where you can vent like that without fear of being shot." James Michenor would have said that an extant, moral value system would erode within six months of having moved to Texas. Here,in Houston, however, my ex-wife’s invective would be a crime,a violation of a city ordinance, forbidding the use of abusive language in public, lumped together with threats. The stop-sign runner would probably have gone free. Both infractions bear equal fines, $300 each. 1 Golden Rule: Dem dat has da biggest gun and da most gold, makes da rules. 2 Miss Manners,one of our etiquette mavens,once pointed out that correcting bad manners was more rude and classless than ignoring them.